Can we teach "Generalised Competence?"

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Unless you have been out of the loop when it comes to the purpose of education, you will have heard the following argument: Businesses say they need more employees who can creatively solve complex problems, and, confusingly perhaps, they don't even know what those problems are yet because the jobs don't exist. Schools, therefore, should give students lots of open-ended problems to solve and opportunities to work in groups to prepare them for this uncertain future.  

In short - Businessman says: Hey, schools, these kids are a bunch of numb skulls who have no idea how to solve all these problems I created in my business! (Presumably, these are complex problems like infinite growth on a finite planet or how to re-create the pure marketing genius of "dove won't dry your skin like soap can". I digress.) This leads schools to think, hmmm... we don't teach this, we teach knowledge... Perhaps we need to change and start to teach these critical life-skills. But how? Well, I know, how about problem-based learning/project-based learning - basically anything emphasizing what the kid is actually doing, rather than the content to be covered. This is more like "real-life," so it must be good. Give them authentic, "rich problems" to puzzle over, and then, of course, this "puzzling over" will convert into wizardry juice and solve all those pesky problems our illustrious businessmen don't have the knowledge to train their employees how to answer. 

Unfortunately, life isn't as simple as school reformers until this point seems to think: 

This tweet provoked a reasonable amount of controversy on Twitter, mainly from people who, of course, believe that generic problem solving is, in fact, a skill that you can teach. It would be strange if some educationalists and teachers didn't believe that "thinking" was a generic skill you would work out like a muscle, given how ubiquitous this perspective has been over the last 20 years. 

Responses to the tweet came in a variety of guises...

1) All knowledge can be used to solve problems. Therefore, all knowledge is a generic problem-solving skill.

Yes, but this is the point! We should teach the specific, the concrete, the basics, and ensure this is fully mastered. When we do this, when the schema is well-developed, we can use this knowledge to solve multiple problems across domains. The usefulness of certain knowledge, in general circumstances, is well documented. This doesn't mean you are teaching a 21st Century skill, it means you are teaching powerful knowledge. 

2) We can train kids to have certain desirable character traits such as resilience, which will enable them to persevere and solve all and any of life's problems.

People's resilience depends on the health of the system, did they get enough sleep, did someone call them moon-face in the corridor, did they have breakfast? Doing the "being resilient act" in one context (like a classroom) in no way guarantees you'll be able to take it somewhere else. Our resilience and many other traits are so varied and variable that they cannot rightly be called skills you have acquired, they are more like personality traits and notoriously difficult to categorize let alone teach. Not to mention, what the hell is resilience/grit/bounce-back-ability anyway? (cue 20 academics with 20 books and 20 different definitions)

3) All domains-specific items are part of a larger domain. Therefore, all knowledge is domain-general

Many of the approaches specified above (project-based learning, problem-based learning, authentic-rich problems) are top-down. The minutiae will be forgotten to focus on the general. It is probably the case that there is a sweet spot - Goldilocks and the three bears style - of generality and specificity in learning. However, the tendency to be top-down, to think that just *by reasoning and communicating* we can become better at both of these two things, needs challenging.  It implicitly places knowledge as a secondary consideration. It doesn't mean we delve immediately into only the minutiae. However, it does mean, pay more attention to the curriculum and then reason about that content. 

4) You can learn general problem-solving strategies, one of which is learning to be an inquirer who looks into the problem and finds out about the issue.

It's entirely natural to ask questions, without doing it, you wouldn't survive. You cannot do anything without enquiring about it. The EASY part is asking questions, the hard part is knowing what questions to ask. Knowing what questions to ask isn't generic, it requires knowledge of the domain. A mechanic will ask relevant inquiry questions about cars but probably not about the problem of why you can't unproblematically add more cubits to the chip of a quantum computer. 

Regardless of the responses, these objections miss the main point, and that is the pedagogical approach that has been implied by an uncritical acceptance of the 21st Century skills dogma is now ubiquitous and yet not producing the outcomes it is supposed to. Of course, we want children to be good at solving problems, and we can have a discussion about the right level of specificity and generality to achieve this. We want each individual child to be as excellent at solving all of life's problems as they possibly can be. I want my seventh graders to excel at helping decorate the living room, create art, bake a cake and maybe even find a cure for cancer or solve global warming. Unfortunately, getting them to puzzle over problems they don't have the knowledge to solve isn't the best way of achieving this aim. 

If you need evidence that practicing hard thinking doesn't result in better thinking, just think about anytime you have been unable to solve a problem and whether it, by itself, helped you solve subsequent dissimilar problems. Stressing out over tax returns for hours will not mean you are better at the workplace's tax audit, the specifics are always very different and very important. Creating a funky new recycling system in 8th grade doesn't translate into innovative new forms of computation in University. 

It's fairly apparent to me that some people are better at problem-solving than others in some general sense, but even the most brilliant people cannot be intelligent at everything. Einstein was pretty good at solving physics problems, but I don't know if he would be the man to solve the Brexit puzzle. Any issue involving numbers, though, and I am pretty sure Einstein would have been a useful guy to have around. There are people at work we know who are great at solving Excel related problems but not so good at working out why the guy from IT keeps giving you the stink-eye. 

Do you know anyone at work who just generally solves everything regardless of what that everything is? Chances are that if you do, they have high fluid intelligence. There are, of course, people who are just smarter than other people. Sorry world, but that's a fact. We aren't all of above-average intelligence, most of us are, in fact, shock horror, around about the average intelligence mark. There is nothing wrong with that. So given this, where did the idea that doing stuff and thinking a lot - perhaps building an innovative new bike-rack out of recycled materials - results in students better prepared to solve work-related problems come from? I mean, I used to have to make what I wanted out of wood in D&T, but that certainly isn't going to help me successfully navigate the vagaries of a discussion about next year's PD budget, how to improve recruitment or how to keep the electricity bill down. 

Life is particular, contextual, specific. We are in the world doing certain things at specific moments in time. Furthermore, we are always thinking, always considering, always enquiring. Do those who advocate an "inquiry-based" approach believe that, were we to fail to get kids to ask a lot of questions about an invented problem, that they might spend the rest of their life completely forgetting to ask questions about all of the challenges life will place in front of them? One very peculiar manifestation of this is the idea that we shouldn't answer student's questions by telling them the answer, all in the name of developing autonomy. If you don't answer students questions, teacher, they will stop asking questions. That's not the way to build inquisitive learners who seek to inquire. 

To be more serious, here are three things that could be useful...

1) Teaching kids rigorous philosophical logic. Not getting kids to give random opinions on life-after-death or free-will (although this can be fun) but teaching them about logical fallacies, what constitutes a premise, what a counter-factual is, what the difference between validity and soundness is, what A Priori and A Posteriori mean etc. I think this will make them better thinkers. I would teach this very explicitly, with precise sequencing and using a mastery approach. We could then practice the application of these principles by debating provocative questions. This doesn't imply in any way that generic thinking skills exist, it means that there is a body of knowledge called logic, or even philosophy, that we can teach children and that might be useful to them. 

2) We should think about the health of the whole system and the individual as part of that system. I think we can get hung up on distinguishing resilience from grit from determination from patience from any other list of beautiful words we can use to describe children. Instead, I think about it like this, the human being is a system. When systems are healthy, they work better. If you oil your car regularly, it's less likely to break down. When the human system is healthier, it will function more effectively. If we teach children how to be socially and personally healthy with themselves and others, the whole system will operate on a higher level. Ethical decision making and treating other people nicely, fairly, and kindly while strongly reinforcing the negative consequences when this doesn't happen is pretty fundamental for creating a safe, friendly warm-cuddly-healthy system in which humans can thrive. Given that even gut-health has now been linked to autism, it's getting more and more evident to us that overall healthiness is a crucial factor in the cognitive performance and efficacy of individuals. Schools should take this seriously. 

3) The one blog that I have read that persuaded me about the possibility of changing some of the "hardware" of our system was from the learning scientists, and it was about mindfulness. Think about mindfulness as emptying out working memory. The opposite of mindfulness is mind-wandering or worrisome thoughts that can't seem to be stopped or alleviated. Mindfulness is not just calming down; it's becoming aware of yourself and your own thought processes in such a way that you can bring them under "your" control (what "your" might mean here is for another blog). Think about it, like closing all the windows in your browser or phone so you can focus on just doing one thing. That action speeds up your computer processing speed. 

It amuses me to think that perhaps the only promising way to improve more general cognitive functioning is the art of not thinking!

If you are a progressive educator like me, please stop looking for magic bullets to solve non-existent problems and start engaging with the real conversation around how we can best serve our students. There are no shortcuts when it comes to the hard work of learning. 

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